Adequately keeping track of financial files like tax records, bank statements, expense reports and more can help you assess your organization’s financial health, maintain compliance and make important decisions for the future.
IBM reported that data breaches cost businesses $4.24 million on average per incidence. Mishandling your organization’s financial data isn’t cheap. And the monetary cost is only the beginning. Your organization will also have to fight to regain the trust of your customers for years to come. While keeping your financial data protected requires extra effort, the cost is too high to not do it.
Keeping your financial records secure doesn’t need to be complicated if you use the right tools. Here are five ways that a document management system can help you protect your financial data.
Encrypts Data
Keeping your data encrypted means that even if an unwanted party somehow gains access to your sensitive files, it will make the information unreadable. Document management should naturally encrypt your data.
For example, our document management system Revver encrypts data using 256-bit AES while both resting and in-transit. It also uses an SSL/TLS connection to encrypt communications to ensure only the correct parties can access that information. That’s a lot of words to say that your document management system and essential files have the same protections in place that banks and government entities use.
Stores Files on the Cloud
Storing your financial files on-site (whether they’re physical or digital copies) can put them at risk for being accessed by the wrong people and being damaged in disasters.
Improve Security and Compliance Across Your Finance Department
An Unwanted Party Gaining Access
Without the appropriate security measures in place, anyone can walk into your office and access sensitive financial information if you’re not careful. And that can happen with digital files too. As technology advances, hackers are also using smarter technology and social manipulation techniques to get past your safeguards and gain access to confidential information.
Cloud storage provided by a document management system can take away access points that unauthorized users may have grown accustomed to using. Especially because, when paired with encryption, a document management system comes equipped with better security measures than you will generally have on-premise.
Data Damaged in Disasters
Data can even be lost without any malicious intent. Disasters like fires and floods can damage your physical and digital files stored on-premise. Technology disasters, like a malfunctioning hard drive, can also damage your files and make them useless.
Document management’s cloud storage can also be a solution to the dangers of losing critical information. Cloud storage means that you will be able to access your files from anywhere. And they won’t be stored anywhere where they could potentially be damaged. They’ll be backed up multiple times inside secure facilities.
Uses a Complete Audit Log
One of the biggest challenges to properly managing your sensitive financial data is making sure it’s completely compliant by being accessible to only the right people. To make sure that you’re properly maintaining compliance across your organization, you should keep the following in mind:
- Is anyone accessing the data that shouldn’t?
- Can you prove that only the right people are accessing your data?
- Are you keeping your data for the required amount of time?
A robust document management system will be able to keep you compliant using audit logs. Audit logs will show you who is interacting with your financial files and the actions they are taking towards them. You can have a log that shows you who has viewed, edited, downloaded and deleted any file within your system.
If you have questions about a change within one of your files, you’ll know who did it and when.
Protects Files with Role-Based Permissions
Even for those within your team, you may have to limit who can see which documents to keep them as safe as can be.
Document management can make it effortless for you to customize permissions for certain people to read, write and edit a document. For example, you can update the permissions for only the admins to be capable of deleting certain documents. For your sensitive documents, you can make certain that other users can’t even see that the file exists.
Your important financial records can only be accessed on a need-to-know basis with document management.
Protects Your Data’s Integrity
How damaging would it be if you had been working with a bank statement (or other file) that had unintentionally been edited? Sometimes you may just need the confidence that you can trust the data that you’re working with. That may look different for different people, but technology exists that guarantees that your information has not been altered in any way.
Document management can be the solution to this challenge. Not only can it lock a document from being altered with the customizable permissions, but it can also keep track of every version of the document that has existed. So you will know if you are working with the most current version, or if the document is in its original format—whatever is most important to your goals.
Document management will make working with trustworthy files as easy as ever.
With all the important financial data that finance teams are responsible for, using something to better manage it is necessary. Revver, a robust document management system can solve all of your file management woes without a hitch so you can rest assured that your data is being taken care of. Discover Revver today.
